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A med & grad student who used to work the line in LA, NYC, SF and Napa talking about the science of cooking and cooking with science. Harold McGee's On Food And Cooking - The Science and Lore of the Kitchen never satisfied my kitchen curiosity and more than one Chef grew exasperated with my asking "Why?" I'll try to stay on topic, but you may see a kvetch or two about the school & hospital.

My posts are presented as opinion and commentary and do not represent the views of LabSpaces Productions, LLC, my employer, or my educational institution.

Well, so emr software has it's problems, not like making them public wouldn't cause them any more trouble as it normally would in a paranoid mind, as this yannisguerra's perspective here. I've delv. . .Read More

Your posts always make me so hungry and its 9am! I saw that amazon now has reruns of "The French Chef" available for streaming. It made me want to go back and check some of them out. I remember. . .Read More

I feel your pain. It is really bad. Even worse when half of those pages are non important informations (like 5 copies of the same lab, including who ordered it, when, where, etc)
So wastefu. . .Read More

If you haven't noticed before, especially from some of my finance tweets, I tend to lean to the right on Economics and Finance matters. Maybe it's the years of working Mergers & Acquisitions. Maybe it's the Econ degree. Maybe I'm just that damn greedy. Or a combination of the three. And Gimpyblog and I got into a discussion on salaries on twitter earlier (around midnight for me). I've Storify-ed the exchange here.

Which leads me to my question - why is compensation in academia so crappy? George Smoot made $149,000 last year, and Elizabeth Blackburn made just over $250,000. Dr. Blackburn would barely qualify as a HENRY - High Earner, Not Rich Yet. I certainly have my ideas as to why, as noted in the link on Storify. And salary certainly doesn't encompass all compensation, but salary can be a good marker of what total compensation is. But, if I was making more in the Finance field, doing incredibly less important work, why could I get away with . . . More

There was a rush in a job well done. Not just any job well done. The rush we got was like rocketing down I-5 at well over 100 miles an hour between Livermore and Bakersfield. Just open road and octane. A friend used to say my job "wasn't nice." His dad's company had been targeted by a competitor. And they'd come to us to help them proceed with a leveraged buyout. After all the research done, we passed. They were in too strong a position. The client paid us our fee and we were on our way. A younger, newer, hungrier outfit tried after us. They were eaten alive in a fierce fight. I don't think those other guys ever found new jobs in our sector. It was that brutal. See, what we did was "Private Equity." A pleasant, sterile name for a very ruthless sector. If our company was sniffing around your doors, chances are someone else wanted to buy you. And when they bought you, we got first pick of all the good stuff. Your corporate retirement and pensions? Gone. Employee Stock Ownership Plan? Not anymore. Jobs? Probably liquidated. All of that stuff was ransacked to pay our salaries and bonuses. You remember in 2008 when Goldman Sachs was still paying bonuses? Yeah, that's how they were doing it. Not from bailout money.

About two months ago, we (2nd year med students) recieved our contracts for FY2011-12. And I was pretty ticked off by my reclassification. No longer a student, now I'm an "independent contractor." Cool. That's fine. Been there before. But now I'm looking cold and hard at some previous student loans coming due. Which isn't terribly worrying. I can more than make the minimum calculated payment, and still make rent, tuition, books, fees.

I'm not terribly sure why we're now "independent contractors." Or at least why I am. I haven't discussed the specifics of my contract with other students, just vague general information. I do think I got the better end of the stipend stick, though. Some of my fellow students? Not so great at negotiating. We're still covered by the school's liability policy, and don't have to seek our own liability. We still have to pay into the school's health plan, which doesn't actually have such hot coverage. But apparently we were only "students" for that first year. Or at least I was.

However, I can now pull off a plan to severely decrease my tax burden. A good example was provided by Brett Arends a . . . More